News | Gamers Nexus - Gaming PC Builds & Hardware Benchmarks

Expected Site Downtime on 12/31

2014-12-30T17:32:42-05:00

Just a quick note: Following-up on the previous post mentioning our impending upgrades, there is anticipated downtime for the site at around 12AM EST 12/31. The duration of the downtime is yet undetermined. We will be migrating and upgrading the website, so it could take the better part of the day. We'll attempt to be finished by noon EST 12/31, though.

Take it easy!

- Steve.

Rumor: NVidia GTX 960 Specs & Release Date

2014-12-29T17:22:11-05:00

The international Consumer Electronics Show kicks off next week in Las Vegas, NV. As part of our annual attendance, we book dozens of meetings in advance with major manufacturers and parts vendors; nVidia, AMD, and Intel are almost always our staples. This time, however, nVidia wasn't booking GeForce meetings and noted that it will be handling things a little differently this year.

Recent rumors stemming from Chinese website Hermitage Akihabara coincide with nVidia's odd skip of CES, claiming that the GTX 960 is expected for announcement in mid-to-late January, 2015.

Rumored specifications of the GTX 960 mention 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus. Although these specs aren't necessarily stunning, it's worth noting that modern compression techniques and other hardware optimizations (including +40% more powerful cores over Kepler) means 128-bit gets us a lot further than it used to. Still, it's not exactly flooring. The rumored price point is ~$210, making for large gaps between the 960, 970, and 980. We still anticipate some sort of 960 or 970 Ti-version to fill one of those gaps.

The new chip is rumored to be the GM206, falling in-line with usual naming conventions (Maxwell uses GM204).

More information soon.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.

Weekend Hardware Sales - $70 120GB SSD, NZXT H440, Fractal Define R4 Discounts

2014-12-28T12:59:13-05:00

Xmas over, we head into 2015 with Broadwell on the horizon and CES announcements just a week away. As always, we'll be posting full CES coverage of new products on-site; until that time, let's recap a few of the post-xmas sales. We found a 120GB Intel SSD, discounted Z97 & X99 motherboards, and Fractal Design cases on sale.

Fractal Define R4 Black Pearl ($80): Fractal Design could be considered a “boutique” case designer. They've got a smaller marketshare than some of their larger competitors, Corsair included, but the enclosures are carefully-designed and almost always receive positive review from users and critics. We've used the Define R4 in a few builds and have found it easy to work with, relatively silent with its foam padding on the walls, and discreet for home office use without shouting “gamer.”

NZXT H440 Black + Blue ($110): Marked down a few bucks from its usual $120 MSRP, NZXT's H440 case is now available in black with blue accents at $110. We gave the case high-praise and awards when we reviewed it and believe that, if you don't need an internal optical drive, it's one of the best mid-tower cases available.

Asrock H97M Pro4 Motherboard ($70): For users seeking a non-overclocking motherboard that'd be best used in a home-theater or budget gaming setup, the H97 chipset makes more sense than Z97. ASRock's Pro4 H97 micro-ATX board is available at $70 right now, making for a solid option when not overclocking.

ASRock X99 Extreme4 Board ($200): One of the most affordable X99 boards around, ASRock's sale extends to include a $70 off coupon (F4-2666C15Q) with the purchase of memory in combo. If you're looking for a budget X99 board for Haswell-E (LGA2011-v3), this is a good starting point.

Zalman CNPS9900MAX CPU Cooler ($30): After MIR and other discounts, Zalman's nickel-plated CNPS9900 Max CPU cooler comes in at $30. The cooler is equipped with a 135mm fan and circular heatsink, providing a classic look and high-performance thermal dissipation. The larger fan allows it to spin at lower RPMs than 120mm counterparts while still cooling efficiently, granting lowered noise levels.

Pick of the Week

Intel 530 Series 120GB SSD ($70): SSDs are cheaper than ever, now priced close to $0.50 per GB. The Intel 530 Series SSD makes for a high-performance MLC solution for gaming setups. It lacks some of the production offerings of the 850 Pro – like encryption and VNAND – but makes more sense for consumers and gamers.

- Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke.

What is the “Texture Fill-Rate” on a GPU and Does it Matter?

2014-12-27T16:59:42-05:00

Ultra high resolution gun textures in Crysis 3.

As a part of our new website design – pending completion before CES – we've set forth on a mission to define several aspects of GPU technology with greater specificity than we've done previously. One of these aspects is texture fill-rate (or filter rate) and the role of the TMU, or Texture Mapping Units.

When listing GPU specifications, we often enumerate the clockrate and TMU count, among other specs. These two items are directly related to one another, each used to extrapolate the “texture filter rate” of the GPU. The terms “Texture Fill-Rate” and “Texture Filter Rate” can be used interchangeably. For demonstration purposes, here is a specifications table for the GTX 980 (just because it's recent):

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 & 970 Video Card Specs

	GTX 980	GTX 970	GTX 780 Ti
GPU	GM204	GM204	GK-110
Fab Process	28nm	28nm	28nm
Texture Filter Rate (Bilinear)	144.1GT/s	109.2GT/s	210GT/s
TjMax	95C	95C	95C
Transistor Count	5.2B	5.2B	7.1B
ROPs	64	64	48
TMUs	128	104	240
CUDA Cores	2048	1664	2880
BCLK	1126MHz	1050MHz	875MHz
Boost CLK	1216MHz	1178MHz	928MHz
Single Precision	5TFLOPs	4TFLOPs	5TFLOPs
Mem Config	4GB / 256-bit	4GB / 256-bit	3GB / 384-bit
Mem Bandwidth	224GB/s	224GB/s	336GB/s
Mem Speed	7Gbps (9Gbps effective - read below)	7Gbps (9Gbps effective)	7Gbps
Power	2x6-pin	2x6-pin	1x6-pin 1x8-pin
TDP	165W	145W	250W
Output	DL-DVI HDMI 2.0 3xDisplayPort 1.2	DL-DVI HDMI 2.0 3xDisplayPort 1.2	1xDVI-D 1xDVI-I 1xDisplayPort 1xHDMI
MSRP	$550	$330	$600

The GM204 Maxwell GPU advertises a texture filter rate of 144.1GT/s (or gigatexels per second), a TMU count of 128, and a core clock of 1126MHz. The formula is simple, but we'll get there momentarily. The GM204 GPU filters 128 texels per clock (Int & FP16), or 1 texel per TMU per clock, something we'll explain shortly.

The texture filter rate of the GPU is representative of how many pixels (specifically 'texels') the GPU can render per second. This value is always represented as a measurement over time (1s). A 144.1GT/s texture fill rate comes out to 144.1 billion texels (textured picture elements) per second.

At its inception, the fill-rate was a simpler spec to define: It represented the count of "complete" pixels (that is, pixels that have been completely filtered) that can be stored in the framebuffer (GPU memory). To this end, the texture fill-rate was strictly representative of the number of on-screen pixels that were filtered and written to the buffer.

With modern hardware, off-screen textures can be filtered and rendered before the user even sees them to ensure a smoother transition and framerate when the camera pans next frame. In talking with some video game artists in the industry (cheers, Mike Pickton), we were also able to ascertain a few instances where off-screen texel pre-filtration and rendering could benefit developers. One of these instances includes reflections, whereupon an off-screen object (a tower) may be reflected by an on-screen reflective surface (water, metal). The reflective surfaces of cars and mirrors are other easy examples.

What is a Texel?

Texels comprising a texture. Image source.

The word “pixel” is a shorthand adaptation for “picture element,” or a single dot of the many millions comprising two-dimensional screen space. Texels are “texture elements,” commonly called “textured pixels,” and are representative of a 'dot' in three-dimensional object space. Texels comprise a texture. Texels are mapped to objects and models during a process called texture mapping, which applies color, bitmaps, and textures / rasters to the 3-dimensional polygons, then assigns texels to the corresponding pixels.

Texture filtering kicks-in when determining the correct texture color for each individual texel, ultimately ensuring a sharper and more accurate texture application. Texels and pixels do not always fall perfectly within one another due to various viewing angles and distances dictated by the camera (player). This imperfect alignment introduces the demand for texture filtering, which uses one of many computational approaches to calculate the correct color for each pixel (isotropic & anisotropic filtering methods). A more accurate color selection (better filtering) minimizes the chance of jaggies and shimmering, which can be seen in most games when looking at thin strands of grass, fence posts, and other small modelex objects.

The left image shows shimmering grass due to the level of precision required for such a small object.

Alternatively, rendering the screen at a higher resolution than native and then filtering it down to native resolution (i.e. render at 4K, filter down to 1080p) will reduce jaggies at significant cost to performance. This approach has been introduced with more popularity recently in the form of AMD's VSR and nVidia's DSR.

The Math: Formula for Calculating the Texture Fill Rate

This is pretty easy. To extrapolate the texture filter rate, we can use the following formula:

Texture Filter Rate = Core Clock * TMUs.

In the case of the GTX 980's GM204 chip, that would be 128 TMUs * 1126 = 144128. Note that the 1126 clock speed is measured as MHz, or millions of oscillations per second, so that'd actually be 128 * 1126MHz = 144.1GT/s; in other numbers, 128 * 1126 * (1000/s) = 144.1GT/s.

Although this formula is straight-forward for some modern hardware, AMD has a different approach to the texture fill-rate. A GM204 GPU (bilinearly) filters 128 texels per clock cycle (integer or floating point 16), effectively 1 texel per TMU per clock cycle (resulting in the numbers above). A Hawaii GPU filters 176 texels per clock cycle (INT) and just 88 texels per clock cycle (FP16), so depending on the task at hand and type of filtration, the theoretical max texture fill rate will vary on this hardware.

Note: The architecture is vastly different between competing manufacturers and the texture fill-rate cannot be linearly compared without factoring-in other technologies.

For additional example, the old VooDoo2 and RIVA TNT graphics processing architecture – this would be c. 1999 – did not process a clean 1 texel per 1 unit either. This was during a time when texture fill-rate was the “in” spec to capitalize on when developing marketing materials, similar to how modern monitors advertise contrast ratio numbers to a point of irrelevance. The VooDoo2 hosted two texture mapping units (TMUs) and had a clockrate of 90MHz, so using our formula above, that'd be a theoretical max of 180Megatexels/s. In actuality, however, each of the two VooDoo2 TMUs had to work together simultaneously to process the same texel (they could not alternate texel processing).

This was great if the game utilized a technique called “dual texturing” (applying multiple textures to a single polygon, with each texture occupying the same pixel space), because then one TMU could work on “Texture A” while the second TMU works on “Texture B” for the same pixel space. Because this was in an era where some games would apply a single texture to a single pixel, sometimes the second TMU would sit about doing nothing as the workload was only enough for one TMU to perform (hiring two people to perform a one-person job).

The takeaway is that although the VooDoo2 had a theoretical maximum texel filter throughput of 180MT/s, in most instances it would be somewhere between 90 and 180 MT/s depending on type of filtration and texture application.

In other words, all the marketing reflected only the higher numbers, but those higher numbers were not representative of 100% of use cases. Texture fill-rate is not always as high in practical use as advertised. And that's not the only reason, as we'll find out below.

Why So Many Texels?

Image source: Microsoft.

144.1GT/s, or 144,100,000,000 texels per second, seems like an awfully large number. Despite potentially seeming unattainably high, it should be noted that this is a theoretical maximum texel throughput under ideal conditions. A GPU does a lot more than texture filtration. Other bottlenecks will present themselves prior to exceeding the texture fill rate of high-end hardware, in most instances.

Most users will never come close to exceeding that 144GT/s pipe. Let's assume a 4K screen resolution. That'd be 3840x2160 pixels, or nearly 8.3 million pixels. Consider next that we're attempting to draw these pixels at a minimum frequency of 60 FPS (60 times per second), and now we're at 498 million pixels drawn per second. Texture filtering becomes more complex and demanding when using different filtration technologies in games, like bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic filtering.

We won't get into what each filter technique does in this article for scope reasons, but you're effectively multiplying the pixel count by an additional factor of X (4X anisotropic filtering samples 4 times per pixel to determine the correct texel color and provide a sharper image for the current viewing angle).

Throw an extra 4X filtering on there for good measure, and now we're at just 1.99B pixels per second. Modern game graphics effects will begin to more heavily saturate this pipe in other ways, like off-screen texture filtering / rendering for use in an on-screen fashion (as described above with pools and cars).

We can exceed a billion – even 3 billion – texels per second at such high resolutions with high-sample filter techniques and a higher FPS, but that still isn't going to hit 144.1GT/s. The GTX 980 will also throttle on other components before ever approaching such a number. Even though some software will demand higher texture fill-rate before taxing other components (like shaders or ROPs), most GPUs will crumple under the load of rendering a high-fidelity graphics at 4K before reaching texture fill-rate pipe limitations.

So... what?

Texture fill-rate doesn't matter as much as it did in the days of the VooDoo2 and TNT architecture; at least, not for gaming. VooDoo2 and TNT were also introduced at a time when screen resolution had vast changes and improvements pending, making pixel count more relevant. Although an AMD Eyefinity setup could tax the TMUs in a more threatening fashion, it's generally the case that the majority of PC gamers will run into other bottlenecks first – including ROPs, memory, or even the CPU at some point. Game optimization is also an imperfect beast that introduces its own limits that may precede hardware limitations.

Let us know what random aspect of computer hardware you'd like to learn about next by tweeting at us or commenting below.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.

We're Upgrading Servers, the Website, and Our Content

2014-12-26T17:52:27-05:00

This is written for our more loyal, recurring readers (and you are all greatly appreciated!).

I posted a year ago that we'd have a massive mobile and front-end overhaul online in 2014. It's looking like I may be able to keep that promise. After a year of being tied-up in development hell, troubleshooting, bug fixing, and redesigns / innovation, we're approaching the end of the development cycle for our new website template. This new template will feature front-end upgrades, unseen structure updates, and will function significantly faster in loading than the present template. Similarly, the new site has spent the last few weeks getting a mobile facelift – we're trying to build a usable mobile version of the website.

I say “usable” because, as a user myself, I rarely prefer the mobile layout of a website to its desktop companion. I'd almost always rather fumble through with pinching and scaling than try to navigate an altered mobile layout. We're trying to fix that.

The new website also features a few extremely useful (and exciting) features, including a hardware specifications dictionary that properly defines all major hardware terms in a single place. If you spot something like “ROPs,” “TMUs,” or even just “CUDA cores” and want to learn more about it, we're making that easy. Navigation is key to the new design, as is information conveyance.

We have a few really cool and fun PC building software solutions in the works, too, but those won't be implemented until after the new site template is online.

Alongside the template upgrade is a server upgrade. The current server hardware isn't too exciting – I think we're on 4GB of ECC RAM right now, which is frankly mind-blowing compared to the 256MB we started on. The current CPU priority is mid-range on our virtual server, so we still have to fight other websites for CPU cycles during times of load. I'm still running the numbers, but we're planning to upgrade to more memory and higher CPU priority with the new site.

Finally, there's a lot of big content in the works. If you've read some of our heavier-hitting research and peer-reviewed pieces (like the SSD anatomy post), you'll be happy to hear we've got more content of that depth in the works. It's very difficult to write such detailed content on a regular basis – we strive for accuracy, which means several passes of peer review from engineers. That's a slow process since these people are volunteering their time freely to fact-check us, but it is something we've managed to streamline with recent connections in the industry.

I'll have a proper end-of-year post on the 31st, as I've done the last few years. This, quite honestly, was written just to get something online while I take a day off.

Whew.

US Trade Commission Opens NVIDIA Patent Infringement Investigation

2014-12-25T02:47:21-05:00

Samsung and nVidia have been embroiled in a tit-for-tat legal battle for the better part of 2014, with Samsung opening a counter-suit against nVidia for patent violation. NVidia originally targeted Samsung and Qualcomm for alleged implementation of nVidia-patented GPU technology in mobile devices, demanding that Samsung devices be removed from circulation in the United States. In a counter-suit, Samsung levied its own patents against the GPU giant, making similar demands on trade restrictions.

Among other complaints, Samsung's original counter-suit alleged that nVidia infringed upon technical patents detailing cache control.

The US International Trade Commission just recently announced that it will move forward with an investigation into nVidia's operations. A similar result is expected from the ITC regarding Samsung (stemming from nVidia's own lawsuit against the company).

Nothing will come of this for years yet, but we'd anticipate a settlement of sorts long before any public resolution.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.

Intel Misses Another Deadline on Broadwell, Looks to 2015

2014-12-24T18:02:11-05:00

Broadwell has missed its internally-imposed deadline numerous times now – at least twice publicly, three counting today – and has previously had its tardiness addressed. Back in May, we wrote that Intel promised Broadwell “in time for the holidays,” a period that has come and gone.

With the holidays towering over our shoulders, we must look to 2015 for Intel's updated processor lineup. The most recently updated roadmap (November) plants 5th-generation Core processors in Spring of 2015, with Skylake (6th-generation) landing in 2H15. It appears that Intel is making significant changes to Skylake's architecture when compared to its preceding Haswell chips. The company hopes to drop its fully-integrated voltage regulator (FIVR) and revert back to relying almost entirely on the board for the VRM. This move should drastically reduce heat and could potentially offer more overclocking headroom, depending on how the company builds its SKUs going forward.

We recently wrote about the mass adoption of DDR4 to market, noting that Skylake would play a large role in DDR4 pick-up. This is because the 6th-gen platform is capable of supporting both DDR3 and DDR4, though we're yet unsure as to whether this will be SKU-designated or if the processors can just be mounted to different boards (we'd imagine it's SKU-based).

As for Broadwell, we expect it'll make a showing at CES in early January. We'll be speaking with Intel a few times at the impending tradeshow, so be sure to stay tuned to our twitter, facebook, and YouTube pages for info as it rolls out.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.

Last-Minute Game Gifts – Entire Trilogies for $30, Digital Downloads Save Us Again

2014-12-23T12:54:24-05:00

After going big on family gifts, it's not always in the funds to get things for gaming friends and clanmates; the rise of Steam, Origin, and other services have changed that. There's a huge Steam sale right now, but you can also grab games like Battlefield for $1, Dragon Age: Inquisition for 30% off, and Titanfall for $10 via EA's revamped Origin store.

We've already overviewed Steam's sales – here's what Origin's got.

First Person Shooters Under $10

Titanfall ($10): One of the most anticipated games of the year, Titanfall's initially buggy and unoptimized PC launch has been largely patched-up at this point. The game isn't the most innovative in our eyes, but it's good for several hours of play and well worth a $10 price tag. If you like quick, twitchy gameplay with more modernized weapons, you'll like Titanfall. Also mechs. See if your PC can handle Titanfall on our benchmark.

Battlefield 3 ($1): After offering Battlefield 3 for free recently, the server population has been rejuvinated to a point that rivals Battlefield 4. The two games play largely the same and even have similarly high-fidelity graphics, so if you'd rather pay a buck for a more stable game than $15 for BF4, it's a worthy investment. Easily a few hours of play, and at $1, that's good value.

Crysis 3 ($10): Crysis is one of the best benchmarking platforms available. It's also got one of those “story” things, if that interests you – but for our audience, we'd encourage picking up the game for its GPU benchmarking abilities. Let us know how your system performs once you've got Crysis 3 installed.

RPG Series & Trilogy Sales

Mass Effect Trilogy ($28): Mass Effect ($7.5), Mass Effect 2 ($10), & ME3 ($10) total $28, so you could have the whole trilogy for under $30. The Mass Effect games loosely parallel KOTOR's story arc and offer great role-play depth in a traditional sci-fi universe.

Dragon Age Series: The brand new Dragon Age: Inquisition is marked down to only $40 right now, and its preceding titles (Origins - $10, DA2 - $10) can be had for $20 even. The whole trilogy up til now makes for a high-fantasy, dialogue-driven RPG with tremendous character depth.

Kingdoms of Amalur ($10): Written by the famed R. A. Salvatore, known for Drizzt Do'Urden and the Forgotten Realms universe, Kingdoms of Amalur is a story-driven singleplayer RPG with a critically-acclaimed writer behind the story.

Mirror's Edge ($10): Mirror's Edge is one of my favorite games. It's a 3D platformer with a focus on parkour and New World Order-style plot development. Guns are present, but are an “only if necessary” deal – your best bet is to outrun the enemies, making for a more unique playstyle than most other games involving guns.

Space Sims, RTS, & Misc.

Wing Commander ($5): Fans of Chris Roberts and Star Citizen know that the famed developer gained his renown in the early 90s with Wing Commander. The entire Wing Commander series is available via Origin at $5 each right now, dating back to 1993.

Stronghold 3 ($8): Marked down from $30, Stronghold 3: Gold offers an RTS with a story-driven singleplayer campaign set in a fantasy universe. Given the rarity of solid fantasy real-time strategy games, we've taken a liking to the Stronghold series.

Let us know what sales you found by tweeting at us or posting below!

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.

NVidia Boost 2.0 & Boost Clock Throttling when Overclocking

2014-12-22T14:21:30-05:00

This article topic stems from a recent reader email. Our inquisitive reader was curious as to the nature of variable clock speeds, primarily asking about why GPUs (specifically nVidia's) would sometimes log slower clock speeds than the overclock settings; similarly, speeds are occasionally reported higher than even what a user OC reflects.

Variable clock speeds stem from boost settings available on both AMD and nVidia architecture, but each company's version differs in execution. This brief post will focus on nVidia Boost 2.0 and why it throttles clock speeds in some environments. None of this is news at this point, but it's worth demystifying.

What is Boost 2.0?

You'll notice that GPU specification tables list a Base Clock and Boost Clock (check the GTX 970's Newegg listing for an example). The base clock is the frequency at which the silicon oscillates (measured in millions of times per second – or Megahertz). The boost clock measures the same oscillation, but reports a faster speed; this is because the boost clock only kicks-in under certain conditions and is a modification of the base clock. Those conditions are generally defined by performance demand on the system, temperature target, and power consumption target (on Maxwell).

A GPU will generally boost only if a game or program requires additional power. This was introduced after nVidia's rocky (and somewhat hated) GTX 400-series Fermi launch, which was one of the hottest GPUs ever made. A variable clock speed means that the GPU isn't running at full-throttle constantly, ensuring more gradual power consumption and thermal activity.

If the GPU has exceeded its thermal target (defined manually within software like Precision, if not using the default settings), it will throttle the clock speeds automatically until the GPU reaches a point at which the temperatures are under control. This is why some users experience lower FPS than reported by benchmarks and product pages and also why logging software will report dips in clockrate.

Boost will also make clock modifications based upon power target. If a user has specified a lower power draw for conservation or thermal reasons, the GPU will throttle any time that wattage is met or exceeded. Similarly, Boost will ensure that the GPU doesn't clock-up just because it has room to do so; in theory, the clockrate will remain tempered until the game actually demands additional processing power to maintain a high framerate.

Can I Force Boost or Max Clock Speeds?

Using EVGA's Precision, “K-Boost” can be enabled to force maximum clockrate regardless of conditions. K-Boost is somewhat buggy and unreliable, often introducing instability to the system and resulting in driver crashes. We've discarded it for testing and benchmarking purposes. For consumer use, we strongly discourage the use of K-Boost as it can cause diminish the usable life of the GPU. We'd suggest K-Boost only under the condition of benchmarking, followed by disabling it for normal gaming use.

I'm Curious Now – How Do I Check my Clock Speeds?

If this post has gotten you curious about how hardware functions, you can take the following steps to logging your own GPU's clockrate:

Download MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision.
Download GPU-Z.
Run GPU-Z.
Navigate to the Sensors tab.
Select “Log to File,” then disable logging after playing a game.
Open the log to view the clockrate. Follow our Maxwell overclocking guide and use Precision or Afterburner to perform light overclocks, then test again.

Let us know your findings! Tweet at us for immediate input, advice, or thoughts or post on our forums for in-depth support.

- Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke.

WD Blue vs. Black vs. Green Hard Drive Comparison – What's the Difference?

2014-12-21T11:05:41-05:00

We've often remarked that naming structures and product branding can be a confusing space, especially when looking at things like ASUS' motherboards. Western Digital's hard drives follow a somewhat standardized branding scheme of “black is best,” then the company uses “blue,” “green,” and “red” for its other HDD options.

Today, we'll compare the WD Blue vs. WD Black and Green hard drives, then let you know which one is “best” for gaming purposes. These are the drives we're primarily looking at:

WD Green 2TB Variable RPM HDD ($72) – WD20EZRX.
WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM HDD ($53) – WD10EZEX.
WD Black 2TB 7200RPM HDD ($132) – WD2003FZEX.

WD Blue, Black, & Green Specs

	WD Green	WD Blue	WD Black
RPM	5400-5900 Variable RPM	7200	7200
Capacity	500GB - 6TB	80GB - 1TB	500GB - 4TB
Interface	SATA III	SATA III & PATA 100MB/s	SATA III
Form Factor	3.5"	3.5"	3.5"
Cache	64MB	8-64MB	64MB
Warranty	2-Year	2-Year	5-Year
Cost	2TB - $78	1TB - $53	1TB - $75 2TB - $132
Notes	Slower Lower TDP Quieter	Fastest Average noise Highest Density	Fast Noisiest Highest Endurance

The problem with “general rules” in the hardware space is that they lead buyers to believe there's a clear buying hierarchy without regard to use case scenarios. WD's general rule is Black > Blue > Green, but it's not always that simple – there are different use case scenarios attributed to each color, and “best” is classified more by the usage than by the color of the label on the drive chassis.

WD Green Pros & Cons

The WD Green HDDs have had a shaky history. In concept, WD Greens were an attempt at affordable archival storage with a variable RPM, theoretically allowing boosted speed during higher load times and an overall lower power consumption. The RPM for WD Green drives isn't advertised, but it is generally understood to rotate between 5400 – 5900 revolutions per minute.

Earlier revs of the WD Green drive exhibited failure from header disconnects and seek errors, attributed to the variable RPM. These issues have been largely resolved with the newer WD Green drives.

WD Green's primary advantages are regarded as:

Higher capacity at a more affordable price.
Lower power consumption.
Useful as cheap, archival storage.
Quieter.

Its disadvantages are:

Slower speeds that are inadvisable for primary and gaming HDD usage.
Slower wake and seek times.
Lower reliability over its life.
2-Year warranty.

WD Blue Pros & Cons

WD's most recent Blue HDDs use a single 1TB platter, which allows for higher speeds due to its higher data density. Due to the density of the disk, the travel requirement on the header is minimized (more data in a square inch, so less movement is required) and seek times are reduced. This increases raw speed beyond what is possible even on some of the WD Black drives. Higher data density also reduces cost, as a single 1TB platter has a cheaper BOM than multiple platters.

The Blue drives ship at a maximum capacity of 1TB (1 platter, unless it's an older model) and are always 7200RPM. In the event an SSD isn't present, we generally encourage 7200RPM HDDs as the baseline for primary and gaming drive usage.

Cache for a WD Blue HDD tends to be 64MB, which is more than enough for higher-speed bursted operations; consumer HDDs will generally never (or very rarely) utilize >64MB cache.

The warranty sits at 2 years, less than half of the WD Black's 5-year warranty.

WD Blue's primary advantages are:

Higher speeds – 7200RPM makes it ideal for primary drive and gaming use.
Highest density – best cost-to-performance ratio and speed, even over WD Black.
Relatively quiet for the speed.

WD Blue's disadvantages are:

Max 1TB capacity.
2-Year warranty.

WD Black Pros & Cons

Performance industries have adopted “black” as a general indicator of a flagship device, including nVidia's Titan Black. Somewhat confusingly, WD's Blue drives recently surpassed WD Black in performance when the 1TB platters were adopted. WD Black drives have now been updated to utilize 800GB platters, reclaiming some speed, but are billed more heavily for high-endurance, high-reliability use than for raw speed.

WD Blacks operate at 7200RPM and scale to 4TB ($230), making increased capacity one of their biggest advantages over WD Blue. WD Black drives use a beefier chassis than WD Blue as a part of their vibration control. The drive chassis is built to help handle high-speed fan vibration and odd mounting orientation (think: mini-ITX), reducing the chance of read errors and keeping the header in place.

For users hoping to buy 2TB of WD storage on 7200RPM platters, this is the only real performance-class consumer option. A 5-year warranty accompanies the WD Black drive, making for a more tempting option for production rigs and performance computing.

WD Black's primary advantages are:

A 5-year warranty.
Up to 4TB of 7200RPM storage.
Improved endurance in production environments.

WD Black's disadvantages are:

Significantly noisier than WD Green and Blue.
More expensive per GB.

WD Black vs. Blue Comparison & The Best HDD for Gaming

Ultimately, WD Green HDDs are only useful for mass archival storage at a budget. These are the drives you buy for storing mass media (movies, music, photos) that doesn't require high-speed access and doesn't get accessed constantly.

WD Blue and WD Black are the best two Western Digital options for gaming, if we're ignoring competitors momentarily. WD Black 7200RPM HDDs ($100-$230) make the most sense for high-performance computing that requires increased capacity and endurance, though the vast majority of gamers would do well to opt for 1TB WD Blue 7200RPM HDDs at around $54.

In speaking with Western Digital, we learned that there's not any real technological difference between Blue and Black in terms of the processing and caching architecture; the differences primarily stem from platter density, platter count, and the chassis.

Of course, for the ultimate in performance and reliability, we recommend an SSD (Crucial's MX100 256GB SSD is only $111).

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- Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke.